WALK

She said I looked like a faggot when I walked. 

Something about the way my arms swung. 

We had a membership at the city rec center 

where she’d walk the indoor track and I’d use 

the treadmills. I liked looking over the track 

through the window to the pool where kids and seniors 

had swim lessons. She said I sounded pathetic talking 

about children. She said when she left me 

she’d take all the kitchenware because I knew nothing 

about cooking before we’d met. And by all the kitchenware, 

she meant also the refrigerator and stove. 

You have only yourself to blame, she said often. 

Some of the pool kids must be out of high school by now. 

Some of the seniors, dead. But I’m still angry, 

angrier in fact, revealing something about my tendency 

to hold a grudge, but also perhaps saving me 

from a worse tendency toward inaction in the face of abuse, 

one response to bullying I’ve held to all my life. 

I walk outdoors now. I composed these words 

walking. I sometimes wonder if anyone else notices 

the way I swing my arms and can’t help but think of her 

as I do. A doe on the berm crossed the two-lane road 

as I thought these things. She was alone and I worried 

about her crossing, turned back often on my path to watch. 

Would others follow? How would I signal drivers if I had to? 

All the while seeing how beautiful she was 

and how this might be the epiphany in someone’s poem. 

Anger and grace. Worry and wildness. The movement     

toward instead of away. She made it across unharmed 

and eventually I lost sight of her as we each pursued our purpose,

not redemption but survival, which I understand 

to mean, I have only myself to forgive.

---

NOW I DRIVE STRAIGHT THROUGH

From you on whom I learned life lessons,

I beg forgiveness. Those who learned 

Their lessons on me, I do not forgive.

Drop it, you might say, 

As to a dog with a dead thing in its mouth.

And it’s true, when I get a good hold, I carry

It. To your hands that smell of strawberry,

To your hair curling like smoke up to the clouds,

Cumulus clouds, their curves softer

Than my own. How glad I am then

To be anything that knows what it is.

---

SONG

Shrouding them in fog, protecting them 

from hunters, mountain lions, cruel boys,

the angels love the deer this morning more

than they love me. In the baby changing

room of the rest stop, crowned with treetops soft

as sparrows in a dust bath, a woman sings 

“The Wheels on the Bus” as often as it takes 

to keep a child from screaming. Round they go:

her voice, steady, clear, and calm; the child

fussing in fits and starts. Round and round,

all through the town, beyond the highway, woods,

and fog. By now, I’ve learned the route by heart.

---

KATHY FAGAN’s sixth poetry collection, winner of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022). Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches poetry at The Ohio State University, where she co-founded the MFA Program and co-edits The Journal/OSU Press Wheeler Poetry Prize Series.

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